Kerry's stuck in a Vietnam quagmire of his own making
September 7, 2004

When John Kerry and his managers decided to make his service in Vietnam the centerpiece of his presidential campaign, they must have forgotten that "quagmire" is the word most often associated with that still-controversial conflict.

In the days since the conclusion of the Boston Democratic convention, a quagmire is exactly what Kerry has been mired in. Men who served with him in Vietnam have alleged that he isn't quite the hero he claims to have been or that, at the very least, he renounced the right to brag about his service when he denounced the military that honored him for his service at the time. Only the men who were in Vietnam with him know what really transpired there, but it's the reminders of Kerry's activities after he got home that haunt his prospects more than who's right or wrong about what happened there.

So much has already been written about all this that I decided some time ago to ignore the whole thing. I don't know whether he acted honorably or not, but he was wounded in Vietnam after joining the Navy Reserve and being activated. He was lucky, of course, in that his wounds were not as serious as they might have been, but a man shouldn't be condemned for being lucky.

I changed my mind, though, after a recent conversation with my daughter, who joined the Army a year or so ago and actually wants to get over to Iraq to do her bit.

She reminded me that it is not Kerry's opposition to the Vietnam War that makes her and many in uniform today so unlikely to vote for him. After all, she wasn't even born when Kerry came home from Vietnam and, like most of her generation, has been taught that the war we fought there was a disaster. So Kerry's opposition doesn't really bother her or her friends.

What bothers them, she told me, was that on his return to his country, he turned on those who fought beside him and those who were still in Vietnam. He argued that the war was immoral because we are immoral and made it clear that he believed that the men and women who volunteered or were drafted to fight it were monsters bent upon torturing and murdering innocent men and women in a far-away country.

That, she reminded me, was far different from arguing that the Vietnam War was the wrong war, fought in the wrong place at the wrong time, or that it was a war we couldn't win, given the constraints under which it was fought.

She said that she could never vote for a man who turned on his comrades as Kerry did when he got home. Those who believed Kerry and those like him spit on returning soldiers and made it difficult for those who had served at least as honorably as Kerry to hold their heads up on their return. No wonder they were mad.

Kerry could hold his head up because he returned with an eye on a political career in Massachusetts, where many more voters seemed to share his antipathy for all things military than was true of most of the rest of the country in those days. It would be cynical to suggest that his opposition to the war and those who fought it was dictated by ambition, but what is one to make of Kerry's rhetorical fantasy about being forced into Cambodia on Christmas Eve of 1968 by Richard Nixon, a man who while reviled in Massachusetts, wasn't even president at the time?

It seems that Kerry called one of the veterans who appeared in the second advertisement run by the Swift boat veterans, and, during the course of a rambling conversation, hinted that he didn't understand why the man was mad at him, since his attacks were directed not at his Navy comrades but at the infantry. He also apparently asked if it would make any difference if he were to apologize.

The veteran told the presidential wannabe that he could do what he liked, but as far as he was concerned it wouldn't make any difference because of the damage he did when he originally turned on those with whom he served.

Quagmires, it seems, are easier to get into than to escape.

 

Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, is a managing associate with Carmen Group, a D.C.-based governmental-affairs firm (www.carmengrouplobbying.com).